Memory

Memory is selective, often used to justify our current stance. If I am angry with you, then for this moment, all that I remember is the innumerable times you’ve let me down, hurt my feelings, ignored my needs.
I remember the times you have abandoned me, screamed at me, kicked things off the table, smashed my fingers in car doors, elevator doors, and under prefab houses. I remember how you criticized my drawings, my singing, my way of talking, my way of walking, I remember that you threatened to have me institutionalized, that you shouted at me and demanded the sums of mathematical equations until I was in tears.
I’ll remember that you were gone for years, that you sent me to a Christian school even though you told me it was nonsense, that you told me that the children that I played with were not my friends, that I could trust no one, that I would be alone in life, that I could not play with my first schoolyard playmate because she was black. That you forced me to listen to cassettes touted as subliminal therapy meant to enhance powers of positive thinking and creativity. That you made me fill out lottery tickets for you insisting that I use my psychic ability to select the right numbers. That you asked me for my opinion and ignored it. That you lost our home and couldn’t support us.

This is what I will recollect when it suits a particular mood.

There are other moods for other moments. Then I remember you differently. I remember that you painted murals on the walls, that you took me to climb the mountain many times, that you read the Hobbit to me, that you played your guitar for me at night until I fell asleep and again in the morning when I woke up.  That you brought home a puppy and orchestrated a convincing meeting with Santa. That one year you dressed as Santa yourself even though I was too old to be fooled. That when I had chickenpox and couldn’t go out you brought home a deluxe dinosaur playset that entertained me for feverish itchy weeks of confinement. That you taught me to ride a bike and zipped me up inside your sweatshirt with you when I was tiny.

Today’s memory is neutral, possibly good. I can’t imagine why, but this memory returns to me often, shifts between ages. Could it be that this thing occurred more than once? Or is it remembering it so often and in different moods which has created variations?

I am in the white pick up truck in the parking lot of Sears Lumber. The yellow fields surrounding the parking lot are empty except for the bodies of naked black trees that jut up towards a slate colored sky. Clouds are layered upon more clouds achieving different shades of gray and blue and white and black, some smooth and some lumpy with the promise of rain, of thunder, of lightning.
The smell of moist earth. A special smell that has become familiar to me through the years, a smell that comes in late autumn and in winter after the rain has wetted the dead grasses and made its way to the heart of the clods of dirt that lie exposed. I have smelled it nowhere else but there in that valley that was home. I have smelled rain and wet earth and grass in other places since, but the odor is not the same.
Far away I could see the green and gold and red leafed tops of distant trees in distant fields. A crow perched on a lamppost cawed, a sound that I have heard in other places, the  harsh hallow voice of a big black bird.
The lumber store is the largest in a row of commercial buildings done in mocha hued stucco and wooden signs and beams painted dark chocolate. There is a little Mexican cantina that I have never been in, and a beauty shop, and empty shop windows where there are vacancies. All in all the strip has room for no more than five or six establishments.
The parking lot is vast and cracked and uneven, and all around it the empty fields yawn like a sea of grass interrupted only by the line of buildings in the east and Lakeshore drive in the south. Behind Lakeshore a wall of trees hides the view of La Laguna Grande, but it has not been called by that name for decades.
It is now Lake Elsinore, named for Hamlet's Castle Elsinore, and the town is named the same. The sea of grass is broken by buildings and trees off in the west, and beyond that the mountain sleeps under the soft blankets of clouds. Our house is over there, underneath the mountain, planted at its feet.
I look at the field, the clouds, the naked trees and imagine I am in some east coast village in some forgotten era. In a moment I will see a maiden in a hooded cloak rushing away from or towards some terrible danger, a basket dangling from her arm. In another moment I will be the maiden.
I have never been to the east coast, or anywhere at all other than this valley and the stretch of highway that leads to my grandparents' home in Phoenix, Arizona. 
In another moment it is a European copse, in another I am gazing upon the shire. These fields are ripe with magic. You can smell it in the air.  Or rather I have imposed the magic of my imagination over these  empty fields, and their smell has become special  by association.
I want to stay in the pick up and day dream. In one version of this memory I do. In another I go into the lumber store with you and am allowed to stand by myself looking with wonder at hardware while a pimple faced young man in jeans and a flannel helps you find whatever it is we have come here for.
In another version my little sister is here and she wears a flannel and jeans and our house is still under the mountain to the west, but it is no longer ours and we live in someone else’s house to the north.

All versions share the same sky, fields, parking lot, commercial building, and season. It is one memory which has expanded to encompass a few others for simplicity’s sake.
Memory is selective in every way. I have conjured this particular memory, or cluster of memories, on other days similar to today. On days when clouds gather and the light is exactly as it is now and I feel neutral. Some days the memories are angry, some days they are happy, others, like those arising today, are neutral, but almost all are laced with an undercurrent of sorrow and loss.
And you are always there, lending a back story to my emotional state, a conglomerate of memories that I call Father.

Sorry

I’m sorry.
We hear these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. I am so sorry.
And we never know how to respond. We can’t say yes, you should be, even if it’s possible that you should.
How could we face that? The fact that we are people whom others feel sorry for? How could we walk tall, smile, laugh, be intelligent or strong or cheerful knowing  that everyone feels sorry for us? We would have to fit in with their expectations and be lost, heartbroken, and hopeless if we agreed that we should be the subjects of sympathy. 
We don’t ever say, yes, you should be. What we say is: “It’s ok.”

But it is not ok. It makes us feel very uncomfortable saying that it is. As if we are cold and uncaring, as if we never miss him, as if remembering his death does nothing to impair our high spirits.
Sometimes I laugh when I say it. Not always. It doesn’t even matter that laughter is the worst answer, nothing that I have ever said in response to “I’m so sorry” erases the strangeness that enters the other person's eyes when I say it‘s ok.
What is it? That they actually feel sorry? That they are afraid? That they don’t believe that I’m ok? That they think it’s horrible that I am ok? Maybe they’re just uncomfortable like me?

Inevitably, the next question is: how did he die?
My oldest daughter answers enigmatically. Her top responses are as follows:
“From a head wound.”
“From a gun wound.”
“A bullet.”
I believe that this works for her because she is young and quiet. Though they don’t know what they really wanted to know they dare not press the issue. Those brief and incomplete explanations send people scurrying as if a grenade has just landed at their feet. The wideness of their eyes parallels the unblinking roundness of a full moon.

I tend to half whisper:
“It was a suicide.”
I feel ashamed every time I am forced to admit this. After the first answer there is just a certain amount of darkness hovering around us, the general gloom of death. We might have been a nice happy family that suffered a tragedy. People might picture him as a war veteran, or the victim of a sudden car accident, or  as someone that succumbed to a terminal illness.
Then they learn that he wanted to die. Another question springs to their minds of course, but it is not the kind of question one asks.
Why? Why? Why? It is a much greater darkness, a sin, this particular death. And it implies that we were never a nice happy family, there was always something about us which could have commanded sympathy.

Frequently I wish that I would have thought of something else to say. A complete fabrication. A lie, Huckleberry style.

“He was a lion tamer, like his father before him. It was their final act, the famous 'jaws of death', a real crowd pleaser, but sadly, Cuddles, the lion, sneezed at a most inopportune moment claiming my darling husband's life. Cuddles also  had to be put down. Once a man eater, even if by accident, always a man eater.”
“He was walking down California St. and somebody dropped a piano on his head.”
“He was a stunt aviator. A seagull hit his windshield during a loop de loop and he spun wildly out of control.”
“He was a Sherpa. Just before retiring he led one last group into the Himalayas but none of them were ever seen again.”
“He and his party were eaten by cannibals during an anthropological study of indigenous Amazonian peoples.”
“We were at the zoo. An escaped elephant trampled him to death near the penguin exhibit. He ran in front of it actually. To push a baby stroller out of the way.”

I wish I would have chosen one of these and stuck with it until it was as good as true. But I forget that we are shrouded in great darkness and only remember it once the line of questioning brings me back to a half whisper.
We would prefer to be casual acquaintances forever, people you recognize by the way we smile and laugh. People you know who are good at crocheting and singing and giving hugs. People that read a lot and wear funny hats and talk too loudly.
But never people you are sorry for. Never  people who lost someone. That is really never ok.
We say these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. It’s ok. We say them just as often as we hear these words:  I’m sorry. 
And despite the fact that it never really is, whenever we are asked,  it is always ok.
It’s Ok.

Knowing

Nothing I could say would be true. There you are, brown eyes questioning, nervous energy like solar flares arching from your fleshy form. You want to know more about us. It’s as if you just woke up in bed with someone and realized they are a stranger. Worse, you’ve been living together for weeks, drinking from the same cup and suddenly you look up and say, “What’s your name?”

And it’s all about words, names and categories, and stories, and nothing that can be said is true. The Author is not to be trusted. What should I tell you? We are aliens from another dimension trying to build a ship so that we may embark once more on voyages of a questionable nature. Would you believe that I’m an alien with my  soft skin and straw colored hair and breasts like your mother's. You would laugh if I told you this story, but it is possibly as close to the truth as I can get with a story. 

You want to hear something else probably, where I work, whether I have a boyfriend or if I prefer girls, who were my parents, and what are my hobbies. My favorite flavor of ice cream was pistachio when I was little, but it was a long time before I could ever order pistachio because I couldn’t remember the word for it. Each time we went into the drug store I would be asked what kind of ice cream I would like and I would want pistachio, but I only knew the words “chocolate” vanilla” and “strawberry” Thus these were my only choices. When eating in a restaurant I only knew “taco” and “burrito” and so, although I never wanted one, I ordered a number of tacos and burritos. In the same way, even now, after 25 years you say you want to know more about us and there’s nothing I can tell you that is what you want to order.

Or do you want the words at all? Maybe you want to touch my hand, touch my thigh, stick your tongue into my mouth and press your body against mine. Maybe you want me to spread warm and wet and soft around you so you can bury yourself in flesh and know me by smell and taste and touch, by the commingling of cellular information after a part of you is lost in me. What do you really want to know?

Do you want to hear that my great uncle took me to a toy store when I was small and I selected an illustrated children’s Bible, and was rewarded for my pious choice with the additional gift of an island girl Barbie and I made her sneak around in the closet to fuck Ken against her Daddy’s wishes just like Baby from Dirty Dancing?
Or maybe you’d like the story of how I was in a cult, or of the time my husband shot himself in the head on his father’s birthday? The story of how I told our five year old daughter as she collected falling leaves in a parking lot? Or can I tell you of how I am the resistance in a current that flows from Dios through a nervous system and back again?

 I try to make you happy. It does not please me to explain anything at all. I tell you that I make things, I am a creator. That’s what I do all the time, except when I volunteer at school or earn a wage at the farmer's market. Yes, I am an artist, we are artists, that is the story I have for you. It is no truer or falser than anything else I could say. It’s something you could order, something you can believe, something that will make you feel comfortable with these strangers in your bed. We have a name. We are  “Artists.”

The Emperor

I lay on my grandfather’s couch, where he had preferred to sleep during the days, stretched out in front of the television set. The seat cushions were a dark, almost black chocolate color and the back supporting cushions were a gray the color of clay. All of it was soft to the touch and delicately furry. It held the person that lay on it like a gentle beast with silky fur.
The smell of my grandparent’s house was always of wood and vanilla scented candles and black licorice and coffee and the smell of the desert mingled with water and trees and stone. At the table behind me my grandmother was sitting, my father sometimes stood, sometimes sat, beside her, pleading, and my uncle sat at the kitchen bar across from the table. My uncle had a black beard and a booming voice.
The carpet was a rich red orange shag, also soft to the touch. The lace curtains and vinyl shutters filtered the bright sunlight that made its way past the giant elm trees my grandfather had grown all around the house.
My father was asking my grandmother to come and live with us, my mother and my sisters and I could care for her. My grandmother and Uncle rejected his offer. They were mean to him. I felt an intense shock. These people who had seemed to be family were bitterly cruel, they were stabbing my father in the heart. The sounds of their voices were full of a dismissive disdain. They said that my father was a complete fool who could care for no one, that nobody needed him, or even wanted him. I thought that my father would cry. I was filled with rage, my father was here offering help, asking his mother to come with him, and they would not even acknowledge his good intentions. They did not care.
I realized suddenly that they did not like him. That my grandmother and her first bastard son were a special pair, pleased to inflict pain on my father, the other son, the son of the father. They were venting their rage towards the father on his son, because he was not there to receive it.
These were people who had cradled me when I was small, my grandmother particularly. Her skin was always soft, her hair short and white, her body big and round like one of those headless goddess statues. She wore brightly colored housedresses. Now she could no longer walk and could barely speak except to groan a bit and shake her head and sometimes communicate in a slow growling voice like a creature from a swamp.
As a child I had known her only as a benevolent figure who loved me. She did not even love me as much now as she did then. I had been like a pet, a thing which is loveable when it is small and then it is a terrible surprise when it grows too large for the house and drools and barks and wants to run and dig under the fence.
I had already known that my uncle was a wretched cruel heart. When I was a baby my Aunt Peggy shot herself in the head because he ran off with a blonde nurse named Terry and said that he didn’t love her anymore. I was very young at the time and hadn’t been told what had happened, but from the time that my Aunt Peggy became sad and disappeared I disliked and distrusted him. My dislike for him grew when I had to spend time with my new Aunt Terry, because I disliked everything about her. I had loved my Aunt Peggy naturally.
To see my uncle this way was not a surprise, but to see that he had learned such cruelty from my grandmother was terrible. My Father had gray hair. He was tall. He usually seemed rough and uncaring. Now that he was being tender, his new tender feelings were being squashed by a gruesome pair.
I hated them both from then on. I did not want to see my grandmother again. I called once and my Uncle, who was now in charge of caring for her, did all the talking, mostly judging me for my move to a far away city, asking me if I had gone chasing a man, asking what a descent man would want with a woman with little kids (a strange question considering that Terry had a pair of youngsters when he married her).
After that, I would never call again. When my grandmother died, I made little observance of the occurrence. She was a stranger.
Laying on the couch that day, I had noticed that the beautiful tile coffee table constructed by my grandfather had been removed and replaced by the table he had made for my uncle. This one had broken tiles at the corners that left terrible vacancies upon its surface. It made me feel sick to see it there, looking like that.
When my grandfather had been alive the table had stood whole and without fracture. The lawn and trees in the back yard had been green and he had kept a thriving garden of herbs. Now that he was gone, my uncle was here, and with him he had brought a broken table and the death of the lawn and trees and garden. My Grandfather’s land was dead, having been invaded by the desert that in life he had held at bay. His house had become a nightmarish mockery of what it had once been, broken or ill fit odds and ends having usurped the finer objects which had been of his making and had once held sway. And his real heirs wept and were broken hearted by the revolution of death that had turned the father’s kingdom into dust where mites took up residence and ruled over his waste.

Les Iris

I had a poster of a Vincent van Gogh painting, les iris, when I was a freshman in high school. The colors were bright and easy to be absorbed into. It had been rolled in a tube so that its deepest desire now was to curl up once again and sleep in a dark cylindrical womb, but I crucified it mercilessly to the walls with four brass thumbtacks and lay on my day bed and stared into the green and brown and purple blue.
My father disliked it. He even told me that I would go crazy if I kept that poster in my room. Maybe he was right, or maybe the poster was a symptom rather than a cause of insanity, or maybe the poster was completely innocent and uninvolved with madness of any kind, or at least far less involved than my father himself.
But I did lay there and gaze at the poster in silence and through tears. Sometimes from the floor where I lay on the carpet by the door I tried not to breathe, willing my heart to stop beating, begging fate and pleading with my body for death while smelling the paint that made my walls and the door so bright white and seeing les iris shivering on the wall.
What else was on my walls? That poster had only two companions, a Greek orthodox wooden crucifix with a sad Jesus bleeding artistically, and a golden plaque with the lord’s prayer inscribed on its surface. My father may have asked me what I was doing with those on my wall too, because we were not Christians, or at least he was not, even though he had sent me to a Christian school so that I could get a taste of religion and morality.
Jesus was there because I found him in a strange store full of such artifacts and I had thought it was beautiful. I had never seen a Jesus like that before, a Jesus that looked as though he had come from a mosaic in a Byzantine cathedral. It was intriguing to me to see Jesus in a way that had never been presented to me. Christians in my little piece of American hell displayed and wore crosses, but you never saw Jesus dangling from that ornament.
This was the part that they were referring to and hiding with their clean crosses; the bloody man slowly dying while crucified. This was what they were really displaying around their necks and on their bumpers and from the brittle hillsides behind their trailers; the torture and suffering of a man, the death of the God who had a body.
The lord’s prayer had been a gift from my grandmother when I was small. She gave it to me when we moved into our first house. Now by merit of its age and its affiliation with someone soft and warm it had earned a place and glittered on my wall.
But by then, by the time les iris had become part of my surroundings, I did not believe that God could hear me or was listening, if it did exist. I did not talk to the long deceased Jesus, I would not allow myself the luxurious comfort of these fantasies.
I was alone and if there was anybody that could understand my plight, it was the Devil, if he existed. At that time, in the madness of les iris, when I did consider that Our Heavenly Father was waiting in heaven with his milky white and passive son, I was determined to rail against their regime. I was sympathetic to Lucifer.
I knew what it was like to be misunderstood, to fall from grace with the father. I knew what it was like to be demonized for one’s differences. I knew what it was like to love the trees and the wild things and prize them above the walls and rules of society. I knew what it was like to fall.
When I wasn’t hoping to die, when I had given up on taking my disfigured presence out of the world, then I prepared for battle. I sat on my bed facing les iris and wrote on notebook paper my arguments on the devil’s behalf. I wrote stories about those who were different than the rest of the flock or I read books about those who went on living despite their “wicked” natures. I delved into the squirming lines of the flowers and earth and green stems and convinced myself that I too should live, writhing and screaming if necessary, but live, rather than go the way of the sad pale withering Christ, good and nice to the last drop.

Where Dark And Light Meet

I hate my father. I hate all men and everything male. I do secretly wish to castrate them, to dominate and humiliate them. This secret hatred running under my skin ran rampant and was vented on my husband until his death, frightened my old teacher when we sat together under the trees.
In those early days, when it first boiled over the top and I grew out my arm pit hair and swore off the boys, I thought it was because a boy had broken my heart. A boy did hurt me, but even before then my heart had been broken, smashed into a thousand pieces by my father who crushed all of the life out of me, sought to dominate every aspect of me mercilessly, unintentionally. The hatred, the rage must have been growing, welling up inside of me long before that silly boy dealt his blow, also unintentionally.
I could not look at my father after puberty, because of the fear of being squashed, because of the hatred whose twin was desire. Now I know what Freud knew, that I have secretly and unconsciously wished to replace my mother. I have also looked for a man who would replace my father, the one who would be stronger than him and overcome him and become him.
I look at my biological father now knowing these things, and it is knowing them fully that allows me to look because I can be certain that those urges are not what is doing the looking and smiling. I am looking and smiling. The deepest me. The me that is nobody’s daughter, nobody’s wife, no man’s enemy, a wind in the doorway, an eternal notness.
I look at him and he smiles back. He said during a game of murder that he knew I was the murderer because I looked at him and I usually don’t look at him. From then on I made the effort to be awake and look at him. I do this for him, for me, for the eternal notness.
In the forest, with one who would replace him, I also look. I look until he is trembling, I look at the one I have known for 15 years and never looked at. We have inflicted emotional injuries upon one another both intentionally and unintentionally, always driven by those unconscious motives, acting out with each other the desires and resentment we harbor for our parents, always fearful of being crushed.
But now for an awakened moment we are free of those bonds. We are together, our grievances are gone, because I drop all of the barriers that I am aware off and let my heart burn bright and he responds by dropping his and glowing with me and we understand each other.
We are so happy together, like when we were lonely confused children who found solace in each other’s company, only far better because my heart is so much bigger now than it was then, so much braver, brave enough to swallow us both whole and carry us smiling over dusty trails, big enough that this one time, I can protect us both from the unconscious hatred that I have harbored, the hatred that had, from time to time, been vented on him in our youth.
Big and brave enough after a week of time with my biological father, that I know that whatever unconscious urges afflict and drive this other, he can’t hurt me. If he bites my bare pulsing heart with steely knives of rejection, or mischief, they will be baby bites compared to those made by my own flesh and blood.
But he does not bite, instead he hears me telling him something that I have tried to tell him before, something that could not be communicated until we were both made vulnerable by this torrent of love flowing between us. Now, because we finally truly have this understanding, he lets me collect a lost piece of myself that he had greedily and hungrily and achingly horded. He too collects a lost piece of himself in this fair and ecstatic exchange, and he tells me to go and collect the rest of the pieces of myself, all of the pieces that I can find in the darkness of the wasteland. He tells me to love the ones I am journeying with in that darkness, to love them as much as I love him and he loves me, as much as we could have ever loved, as much as we would have loved if we had only known how to do so.